The proliferation of digital cameras and smart phones has lead to an explosion of digital images and videos, creating large personal image and video databases. Since taking digital pictures and videos is easy and practically free, consumers no longer restrict picture-taking to important events and special occasions. Images and videos are being captured frequently, and of day-to-day occurrences in the consumers' life. Since a typical user has already accumulated many years of digital images and videos, browsing through the collection to create a slide show or navigable multimedia presentations is a time-consuming process for the consumer.
Digital slide shows compiled from consumer images and video frames including a musical sound track are well known. As with many transitional modalities from analog to digital photography, digital slide shows have failed to enhance the user experience much beyond their analog counterparts, and have not fully utilized the potential of digital processing and media. With the exceptions of digital transitions and music beat derived presentation timing, images are presented in sequence as the sound track plays, as with analog slide shows. Users typically take pictures of people and objects, with the background as a secondary consideration, unless the user is photographing sunsets or landscapes. Since people and objects provide the primary motivation for photography this should also be the primary consideration for presenting the resulting images. Image editing software such as Adobe “After Effects” is used for creating motion graphics and visual effects and allows users to animate, alter and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built-in tools and third party plug-ins, as well as individual attention to variables like parallax and user-adjustable angle of observation. The problem is that tools like this are very complex to learn and use and require a skilled professional graphic artist. Using extracted objects, people, or a region of interest, theme based “scripts”, and guided user selections, multiple choice options, the entire process of creating an animated/navigable multimedia presentation can be automated. This invention provides an automated method to facilitate the tedious process of creating interesting and personalized multimedia presentations and navigable views for a user's image collection.